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hi friends. Happy Day. i would like to hav postings from all of u out there. Awaiting any useful information u can provide. take care. CU soon!!!
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Friday, March 11, 2005

Fanatics

SPIRIT OF CRICKET

Dear readers I am going to take you through a period of scintillating cricket moving you from the past through the present in to the future. So scatty fans who tighten your seat belts I advice you not to go forward reading this article as it might be of great harm to your craze and be like an expectorant. It might make such crazy fans to drat this gentleman’s game. This is how cricket in 2010 is gonna be. The game loosing its spirit and most of the techniques being Americanized, this jaunty game is going to turn out to become a jaywalker.

In the forth-coming 2010 world cup let there be an encounter b’ween the awesome Aussies and the ever-raising Indians. The so-called greatest venue (Melbourne) in this games history might have only a few people in its stands to rejoice the games spirit. The Indians putting on a mammoth total of 414 to chase might take the field with ease. If you are an Indian, there might be smiles already in your face thinking of an already decided one-sided game.Then in comes the guttural openers swinging their bats, relaxing their arms and shoulders to gybe of this very confident Indian team. India playing with none of the specialist bowlers in view of complete dependence over its batsmen, the new ball gets into to the hands of a new player who takes his run up stride and gets ready to take over the challenge. The ball gets smashed all over the fence only to just add a little bit of worry in the face of the captian who begins to think slowly. The games spirit has been ruined by the politics involved in its board members and committee, which has made great players to just be muted spectators. The game will loose its crowd, which will just make this game as one of those ancient greats or run into the books of history.

Several changes need to be incorporated to make this game retain its pride as one of the gentleman’s if it needs to continue on its reputation. To the dismay of these crazy fans, it might turn out to be just a fading light if such huge politics gets involved into it. As the game progresses, these brutal players tend to bash the Indian tigers who might scratch their heads all around to think for ideas but end up finding none.

For the aussie, greats such as the all time batting maestro late Sir Don, Billy, the Chappells, Lillee, Waugh twins and so on get involved in the development of their disciples, encouraging them to continue the spirit but in the case of our game its just the committee and its members which develops and not any development does the game make in any form. These slow bowlers in a flat bouncy and juicy pitch might prove to be completely incapable of making any mark and it might turn out to be a practice sessions for these heavily talented, old but strong and willing players. This old traditional approach might make the fans to snivel (those who spend time to watch the game even after such a progress). The boards of members are concerned not only in making themselves comfortable with the schedule, but just introducing new faces in every tour and players ending their session with a strenuous effort but unable to yield anything, end up being removed even from the 22 member squad by the same selector. With this approach to the fancy game, a score of even above 800 is a cakewalk.

The changes in this form of game can be like taking players into the game based on their record of accomplishment over a period and not just by creed by which the game is gonna go down. Changes like two wicket matches where only two batsmen play per team and these things can really fantasize viewers and help teams to analyze players individually. Changes like no batsman is gonna be declared out and they continue to play for a specified number of overs and each time they get out runs have to be deducted based on the players. Highly reputed players in international ranking being dismissed might cause team to loose more runs than the lower ranked ones. Training must be given to tail enders to save matches or to survive a spell of fatal and deadly spirited bowling. They should allow players to stick on to their specialized positions and not vary them unless necessary, the top six batsmen being able to bat anywhere in the order. Such things might help this fantasy of the game to last a decade more and the Americanization of the game must immediately barred. The games spirit might get worse and in 2020, it might be only on the small and large computer screens and gaming zones unless serous action is taken to improve its spirit. Teams must be exposed to all kind of tracks, not like slow and weary pitches in subcontinent and fiercy and deadly bouncing tracks where our tigers turnout to become cats or rats and tumble to create new records for themselves. Even the mighty Aussies turn out to look for reasons to escape the dead subcontinent pitches where it favors none other than its own children. Therefore, unless serious action is taken this resplendent perky game is going to fall short of its fans and everlasting spirit in the world of sports: this need resurrection from the deciding members and its committee.

To clean corrosion from car battery terminals: Pour a can of Coca-Cola over the terminals to bubble away the corrosion.

To loosen a rusted bolt: Applying a cloth soaked in Coca-Cola to the rusted bolt for several minutes.

To remove grease from clothes: Empty a can of Coke into a load of greasy clothes, add detergent, and run through a regular cycle. The Coca-Cola will help loosen grease stains.

It will also clean road haze from your windshield.

• If you gave each human on earth an equal portion of dry land, (including the uninhabitable areas) everyone would get roughly 100sqft.• Just twenty seconds worth of fuel remained when Apollo 11's lunar module landed on the moon.• The 'You are here' arrow on a map is called the IDEO locator.• MTV first aired at 12:01 AM on August 1, 1981. The first video was 'Video Killed the Radio Star' by the Bugles.• There are more than 1,00 chemicals in a cup of coffee.• There are only four words in the English language which end in '-dous':tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous .• The number of cars on the planet is increasing three times faster than the population growth

• At - 40 degrees Centigrade a person loses about 14.4 calories per hour by breathing.• Pearls melt in vinegar.• A lion's roar can be heard from five miles away.• Snails can sleep for 3 years without eating.• There is about 200 times more gold in the worlds oceans, than has been mined in our entire history.• Human hair and fingernails continue to grow after death.• Windmills always turn counter-clockwise. Except for the windmills in Ireland.• Termites eat wood twice as fast when listening to heavy metal music.• The cockroach has a high resistance to radiation and is the creature most likely to survive a nuclear war.• In the southern hemisphere, water always swirl anti-clockwise down into a pipe.• About 8 million blood cells die in the human body every second, and the same number are born each second.• Eighteen per cent of all global carbon dioxide emissions are from cars.• Every year, the Moon moves a further 3.82cm from the Earth.• It takes about 20 seconds for a red blood cell to circle the whole body.• 35 meters of hair fiber is produced every day on the average adult scalp.• Hair is the fastest growing tissue in the body, second only to bone marrow.• Dolphins don't automatically breath; they have to tell themselves to do it.

•The term Cop comes from Constable on Patrol, which is a term used in England.• The plastic things on the end of shoelaces are called aglets.• Onions get their distinctive smell by soaking up sulfur from thesoil.• Nobel Prize resulted from a late change in the will of Alfred Nobel, who did not want to be remembered as a propagator of violence-he invented dynamite.• Whoopi Goldberg was a mortuary cosmetologist and a bricklayer before becoming an actress..• Guinness Book Of Records holds the record for being the book most stolen from Public Libraries.• Charlie Chaplin won third place in a Charlie Chaplin look alikecontest.• Walt Disney named Mickey Mouse after Mickey Rooney, whose mother he dated for some time.• Donald Duck comics were banned in Finland because he didn't wear pants.• Because metal was scarce, the Oscars given out during World War II were made out of wood.• A person afflicted with hexadectylism has six fingers or six toes on one or both hands and feet.• Pamela Lee-Anderson is Canada's Centennial Baby, being the first baby born on the centennial anniversary of Canada's independence.• Tokyo has had 24 recorded instances of people either killed orreceiving serious skull fractures while bowing to each other with the traditional Japanese greeting

General Intresting Facts

A Boeing 747s wingspan is longer than the Wright brother's first flight.

Venus is the only planet that rotates clockwise.

Apples, not caffeine, are more efficient at waking you up in the morning

The first owner of the Marlboro company died of lung cancer.

All US Presidents have worn glasses. Some just didn't like being seen wearing them in public.

Walt Disney was afraid of mice.

The inventor of the flushing toilet was Thomas Crapper.

The average bed is home to over 6 billion dust mites.

Plastic lawn flamingos outnumber real flamingos in the U.S.A.

Ernest Vincent Wright wrote a novel with over 50,000 words, none of which containing the letter "e."

Apples are more effective at keeping people awake in the morning than caffeine.

The largest pumpkin weighed 377 pounds.

The largest cabbage weighed 144 pounds.

Pinocchio was made of pine.

Alfred Hitchcock had no belly button for it was eliminated during surgery.

A quarter has 119 grooves around the edge.

A dime has 118 ridges around the edge.

Cranberry Jell-0 is the only kind that contains real fruit.

The plastic things on the end of shoelaces are called aglets.

Maine is the toothpick capital of the world.

New Jersey has a spoon museum with over 5,400 spoons from almost all the states.

There was once a town in West Virginia called "6."

Singapore only has one train station.

The parking meter was invented in North Dakota.

Napoleon made his battle plans in a sandbox.

Roman Emperor Caligula made his horse a senator.

The green stuff on the occasional freak potato chip is chlorophyll.

Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon with his left foot first.

There are 333 toilet paper squares on a toilet paper roll.

The Eiffel Tower has 2,500,000 rivets in it.

"Jaws" is the most common name for a goldfish.

On an average work day, a typist's fingers travel 12.6 miles.

Every minute in the U.S. six people turn 17.

2,500 lefties die each year using products designed for rightists.

Ten tons of space dust falls on the Earth every day.

On average, a 4-year-old child asks 437 questions a day.

Blue and white are the most common school colors.

Swimming pools in Phoenix, Arizona, pick up 20 pounds of dust a year.

In a normal lifetime an American will eat 200 pounds of peanuts and 10,000 pounds of meat.

A new book is published every 13 minutes in America.

America's best selling ice cream flavor is vanilla.

Every year the sun loses 360 million tons.

Because of Animal Crackers, many kids until they reach the age of ten, believe a bear is as tall as a giraffe.

The Gulf Stream could carry a message in a bottle at an average of 4 miles per hour.

The bulls-eye on a dartboard must be 5 feet 8 inches off the ground.

The doorbell was invented in 1831.

The electric shaver was patented on November 6, 1928.

Japan is the largest exporter of frog's legs.

There are seven points on the Statue of Liberty's crown.

Napoleon was terrified of cats.

The first Lifesaver flavor was peppermint.

The typical American eats 263 eggs a year.

The parking meter was invented by C.C. Magee in 1935.

The oldest known vegetable is the pea.

Jack is the most common name in nursery rhymes.

The avocado has the most calories of any fruit.

The first zoo in the USA was in Philadelphia.

France has the highest per capita consumption of cheese.

The shortest English word that contains the letters A, B, C, D, E, and F is "feedback."

The state of California raises the most turkeys out of all of the states.

George Washington Carver invented peanut butter.

Iceland was the first country to legalize abortion in 1935.

The dumbest domesticated animal is the turkey.

Russia has the most movie theaters in the world.

The most fatal car accidents occur on Saturday.

The Eiffel Tower has 1792 steps.

The mongoose was barred live entry into the U.S. in 1902.

Goldfish swallowing started at Harvard in 1939.

Dry fish food can make goldfish constipated.

The stall closest to the door in a bathroom is the cleanest, because it is the least used.

Toilet paper was invented in 1857.

Alaska could hold the 21 smallest States.

Before Prohibition, Schlitz Brewery owned more property in Chicago than anyone else, except the Catholic church.

If you put a raisin in a glass of champagne, it will keep floating to the top and sinking to the bottom.

Kermit the Frog is left-handed.

Nondairy creamer is flammable.

The car in the foreground on the back of a $10 bill is a 1925 Hupmobile.

If you can see a rainbow you must have your back to the sun.

The reason firehouses have circular stairways is from the days of yore when the engines were pulled by horses. The horses were stabled on the ground floor and figured out how to walk up straight staircases.

It's rumored that sucking on a copper penny will cause a breathalyzer to read 0.

The ship, the Queen Elizabeth 2, should always be written as QE2. QEII is the actual queen.

The correct response to the Irish greeting, "Top of the morning to you," is "and the rest of the day to yourself."

Columbia University is the second largest landowner in New York City, after the Catholic Church.

When the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers play football at home to a sellout crowd, the stadium becomes the state's third largest city.

Ohio is listed as the 17th state in the U.S., but technically it is Number 47. Until August 7, 1953, Congress forgot to vote on a resolution to admit Ohio to the Union.

When Saigon fell, the signal for all Americans to evacuate was Bing Crosby's "White Christmas" being played on the radio.

The pet ferret was domesticated more than 500 years before the house cat.

The dome on Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's home, conceals a billiards room. In Jefferson's day, billiards were illegal in Virginia.

The most common speed limit sign in the United States is 25 m.p.h.

At any one time, there are 100 million phone conversations going on in the United States.

The world's record for continuous pogo stick jumping is 41 hours.

The Ottoman Empire once had seven emperors in seven months. They died of (in order): burning, choking, drowning, stabbing, heart failure, poisoning and being thrown from a horse.

You can make edible cheese from the milk of 24 different mammals.

Sir Isaac Newton, who invented Calculus, had trouble with names to the point where he would forget his brothers' names.

In medieval Thailand, they had moveable type printing presses. The type was made from baked oxen dung.

By law, employees do not have to wash hands after sneezing.

The average American consumes enough caffeine in one year to kill a horse.

More American workers (18%) call sick on Friday than any other day of the week. Tuesday has the lowest percent of absenteeism (11%).

Enough beer is poured every Saturday across America to fill the Orange Bowl.

A newborn expels its own body weight in waste every 60 hours.

Whales die if their echo system fails.

Florida's beaches lose 20 million cubic yards of sand annually.

Naturalists use marshmallows to lure alligators out of swamps.

It takes a ton of water to make a pound of refined sugar.

Weevils are more resistant to poisons in the morning than at night.

Cacao, the main ingredient of chocolate is the most pest-ridden tree in the jungle.

In deep space most lubricants will disappear.

America once issued a 5-cent bill.

The average person can live 11 days without water.

In 1221 Genghis Khan killed 1,748,000 people at Nishapur in one hour.

There are 35 million digestive glands in the stomach.

In 1800 on 50 cities on earth had a population of more than 100,000.

More steel in the US is used to make bottle caps than to manufacture automobile bodies.

It is possible for any American citizen to give whatever name he or she chooses to any unnamed mountain or hill in the United States.

King Henry III of France, Louis XVI of France and Napoleon all suffered from ailurophobia--fear of cats.

Before 1850 golf balls were made of leather and stuffed with feathers.

Clocks made before 1687 had only one hand, and hour hand.

The motto of the American people, "In God We Trust," was not adopted as the national slogan until 1956.

More Americans have died in automobile accidents than have died in all the wars ever fought by the United States.

The ampersand (&) was once a letter of the English alphabet.

The principality of Monaco consists of 370 acres.

There are more than 40,000 characters in Chinese script.

During the time of Peter the Great, any Russian man who had a beard was required to pay a special tax.

The first couple to be shown in bed together on prime time television was Fred and Wilma Flintstone.

Coca-Cola was originally green.

Every day more money is printed for Monopoly than the U.S. treasury.

The Hawaiian alphabet has 12 letters

Men can read smaller print than women; women can hear better.

The amount American Airlines saved in 1987 by eliminating one olive from each salad served in first class: $40,000.

City with the most Rolls Royces per capita: Hong Kong.

State with the highest percentage of people who walk to work: Alaska.

Percentage of Africa that is wilderness--28%. Percentage of North America that is wilderness--38%.

Average number of days a German goes without washing his underwear: 7.

Percentage of American men who say they would marry the same woman if they had it to do all over again: 80%.

Percentage of American women who say they'd marry the same man: 50%.

Cost of raising a medium size dog to the age of 11: $6,400.

Average people airborne over the US any given hour: 61,000.

Average lifespan of a major league baseball: 7 pitches.

The only President to win a Pulitzer Prize: John Kennedy for "Profiles in Courage."

The youngest Pope was 11 years old.

Iceland consumes more Coca-Cola per capita than any other nation.

First novel ever written on a typewriter: "Tom Sawyer."

A duck's quack doesn't echo, and no one knows why.

The main library at Indiana University sinks over an inch every year because when it was built, engineers failed to take into account the weight of all the books that would occupy the building.

Each king in a deck of playing cards represents a great king from history. Spades--King David, Clubs--Alexander the Great, Hearts--Charlemagne and Diamonds--Julius Caesar.

If a statue in the park of a person on a horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle; if the horse has one leg front leg in the air, the person died as a result of wounds received in battle; if the horse has all 4 legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes.

Only two people signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4th. The last signature wasn't added until 5 years later.

The Eisenhower interstate system requires that one mile in every five must be straight. These straight sections are useable as airstrips in times of war or other emergencies.

The cruise liner, Queen Elizabeth II, moves only six inches for each gallon of diesel that it burns.

The highest point in Pennsylvania is lower than the lowest point in Colorado.

The first airline, DELAG, was established on October 16, 1909, to carry passengers between German cities by Zeppelin airships. Up to November 1913, more than 34,000 people had used the service.

Titanic was running at 22 knots when she hit the iceberg

The citrus soda 7-UP was created in 1929; '7' was selected because the original containers were 7 ounces. 'UP' indicated the direction of the bubbles

Francis Scott Key was a young lawyer who wrote the poem, 'The Star Spangled Banner', after being inspired by watching the Americans fight off the British attack of Baltimore during the War of 1812. The poem became the words to the national anthem

Because radio waves travel at 186,000 miles per second and sound waves saunter at 700 miles per hour, a broadcast voice can be heard sooner 13,000 miles away than it can be heard at the back of the room in which it originated

Mosquito repellents don't repel. They hide you. The spray blocks the mosquito's sensors so they don't know your there

The bagpipe was originally made from the whole skin of a dead sheep

Inventor Samuel Colt patented his revolver in 1836.

It has been recommended by dentists that a toothbrush be kept at least 6 feet (two meters) away from a toilet to avoid airborne particles resulting from the flush!

In ancient Rome it was considered a sign of leadership to be born with a crooked nose

It is possible to drown and not die. Technically the term 'drowning' refers to the process of taking water into the lungs, not to death caused by that process.

The first known heart medicine was discovered in an English garden. In 1799, physician John Ferriar noted the effect of dried leaves of the common foxglove plant, digitalis purpurea, on heart action. Still used in heart medications, digitalis slows the pulse and increases the force of heart contractions and the amount of b lood pumped per heartbeat. <>

Dry cereal for breakfast was invented by John Henry Kellogg at the turn of the century

During World War II, a German U-boat was sunk by a truck. The U-boat in question attacked a convoy in the Atlantic and then rose to see the effect. The merchant ship it sank had material strapped to its deck including a fleet of trucks, one of which was thrown in the air by the explosion, landing on the U-boat and breaking its back

Jeremy Bentham, a British philosopher who died in 1832,left his entire estate to the London Hospital provided that his body be allowed to preside over its board meetings. His skeleton was clothed and fitted with a wax mask of his face. It was present at the meeting for 92 years.

Diet Coke was only invented in 1982.

Methane gas can often be seen bubbling up from the bottom of ponds. It is produced by the decomposition of dead plants and animals in the mud.

There are more than 1,700 references to gems and precious stones in the King James translation of the Bible

.

The E. Coli bacterium propels itself with a 'motor' only one-millionth of an inch in diameter, a thousand times smaller than the tiniest motors built to date by man. The rotation of the bacterial motor comes from a current of protons. The efficiency of the motor approaches 100 per cent.

Henry Ford produced the model T only in black because the black paint available at the time was the fastest to dry.

At - 40 degrees Centigrade a person loses about 14.4 calories per hour by breathing.

Pet superstores now sell about 40 percent of all pet food

One million Americans, about 3,000 each day, take up smoking each year. Most of them are children.

There are only four words in the English language which end in '-dous': tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous

If you attempted to count to stars in a galaxy at a rate of one every second it would take around 3,000 years to count them all.

Less than 3% of Nestlé's sales are for chocolate.

The average person will spend two weeks over their lifetime waiting for the traffic light to change

More than 2500 left handed people are killed every year from using right handed products

It is estimated that at any one time, 0.7% of the world's population are drunk

The tip of a 1/3 inch long hour-hand on a wristwatch travels at 0.00000275 mph

Less than one per cent of the 500 Chinese cities have clean air, respiratory disease is China's leading cause of death.

The number of cars on the planet is increasing three times faster than the population growth

The X's that people sometimes put at the end of letters or notes to mean a kiss, actually started back in the 1000's when Lords would sign their names at the end of documents to other important people. It was originally a cross that they would kiss after signing to signify that they were faithful to God and their King. Over the years though, it slanted into the X

Nova Scotia is Latin for 'New Scotland.'

The term Cop comes from Constable on Patrol. It's from England.

The collecting of Beer mats is called Tegestology.

Even though it is widely attributed to him Shakespeare never actually used the word 'gadzooks'.

Only 2 blue moons (the saying 'only once in a blue moon ' refers to the occurrence of two full moons during one calendar month) are to occur between now and 2001. Those times are January 1999 and March 1999

There are only 12 letters in the Hawaiian alphabet

"Naked" means to be unprotected. "Nude" means unclothed

Upper and lower case letters are named 'upper' and 'lower', because in the time when al original print had to be set in individual letters, the 'upper case' letters were stored in the case on top of the case stored smaller, 'lower case' letters

In the 40's, the Bich pen was changed to Bic for fear that Americans would pronounce it 'Bitch.'

Language Fun

Seoul, the South Korean capital, just means "the capital" in the Korean language

The name of all the continents end with the same letter that they start with

The "you are here" arrow on maps is called an ideo locator

The word "lethologica" describes the state of not being able to remember the word you want

In English, "four" is the only digit that has the same number of letters as its value

Q is the only letter in the alphabet that does not appear in the name of any of the United States

The word "trivia" comes from the Latin "trivium" which is the place where three roads meet, a public square. People would gather and talk about all sorts of matters, most of which were trivial

TYPEWRITER, is the longest word that can be made using the letters only one row of the keyboard

"Speak of the Devil" is short for "Speak of the Devil and he shall come". It was believed that if you spoke about the Devil it would attract his attention. That's why when you're talking about someone and they show up people say "Speak of the Devil"

The word "Checkmate" in chess comes from the Persian phrase "Shah Mat," which means, "the King is dead"

The sentence "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" uses every letter in the English language

The only 15-letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is uncopyrightable.

Canada is an Indian word meaning "Big Village"

Stewardesses is the longest word typed with only the left hand

The most common name in the world is Mohammed

The longest non-medical word in the English language is FLOCCINAUCINIHILIPILIFICATION, which means "the act of estimating as worthless".

Mafia in Old Arabic means 'sanctuary.'

The longest word in the Old Testament is "Malhershalahashbaz."

Karoke means 'empty orchestra' in Japanese.

The first message tapped by Samuel Morse over his invention the telegraph was: "What hath God wrought?"

The first words spoken by over Alexander Bell over the telephone were: "Watson, please come here. I want you."

Papaphobia is the fear of Popes

The Academy Award statue is named after a librarian's uncle. One day Margaret Herrick, librarian for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, made a remark that the statue looked like her Uncle Oscar, and the name stuck.

The first words spoken by Thomas Edison over the phonograph were: "Mary had a little lamb."

The three words in the English language with the letters "uu" are: vacuum, residuum and continuum.

A baby in Florida was named: Truewilllaughinglifebuckyboomermanifestdestiny. His middle name is George James

'Dreamt' is the only English word that ends in the letters 'mt'

There are only four words in the English language which end in '-dous': tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous

The word 'Bye' is used in both English and Spanish meaning the same thing

Pogonophobia: The fear of beards

In Chinese, the words crisis and opportunity are the same

The infinity character on the keyboard is called a "lemniscate"

Good bye came from God bye which came from God be with you. So-long came from the Arabic salaam and the Hebrew shalom

The word 'nerd' was first coined by Dr. Seuss in 'If I ran the Zoo'

before Jets, Jet lag was called Boat lag

The word "monosyllable" actually has five syllables in it

There are no words in the English language that rhyme with silver and orange

The letter "n" ends all Japanese words not ending in a vowel.

It is believed that Shakespeare was 46 around the time that the King James Version of the Bible was written. In Psalms 46, the 46th word from the first word is shake and the 46th word from the last word is spear.

'Zorro' means 'fox' in Spanish

You won’t find a "6" in Cameroon phone numbers--the native language has no sound for "x."

The only 15-letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is "uncopyrightable."

Clans of long ago that wanted to get rid of their unwanted people without killing them would burn their houses down--hence the expression "to get fired."

Bill Gates

Bill Gates

Well, somebody had to be the richest man on Earth, but why did it have to be him? William Henry Gates III, now just called "Bill Gates" or "billg", rules over a company that is the undisputed monopoly of the computer software business, with tendrills extending in nearly all related fields (and some unrelated ones as well). Through his efforts and the efforts of the folks he has groomed over the decades, his domain and personal wealth have increased at near psychotic-levels while at the same time causing what some might consider permanent damage to the landscape of the very industry he helped form.

In the present day, it is quite useless to discern where Microsoft ends and Bill begins, and vice versa. Instead, to get any idea of Bill Gates, it's best to go back to the 1970s and the early 1980s, before Microsoft went public and shot the little dweeb into the financial stratosphere.

People with roman numerals after their names generally don't lead hard lives, and Gates started his life in a rich suburb of Seattle, Washington. He was sent to the Lakeside Private school starting at age 13, where the school started acquiring a number of high-tech toys from local industry and sales. Gates fell in love with computers at that point, a relationship that never really soured for him.

With his best friend Paul Allen, Gates founded the Lakeside Programming Group in 1971. Not a company but really more of a social group, they made it a goal to get as much computer time as possible from local businesses. One particularly useful contact was the Computer Center Corporation, C-Cubed, which Gates and the rest of the Programming Group would do computer work for in exchange for time on the machines at night. In the first of several major ironies, Gates and pals would comb through the source code of the computer systems they worked on to get programming ideas.

Gates and friends would try and pick up any job they could, and a big break came when a local company offered them the task of writing a payroll program. The amount being paid, however, was not enough to support all four authors, and Gates was asked to leave the group. This was a mistake; Gates' response was, it is said, "Look, if you (ever) want me to come back you have to let me be in charge. But this is a dangerous thing, because if you put me in charge this time, I'm going to want to be in charge forever after". Prophetic words indeed, and in fact the others talked it through and Gates stayed on for the project.

Soon the Lakeside group was getting more and more jobs, including a class scheduling program for their school. (Gates has claimed that he programmed the scheduling software so that it always scheduled him together with all the prettiest girls in his class). Another major project was analyzing traffic data for the Washington Road Department, to determine allocation of funds. For these projects, the Lakeside Programming Group made thousands of dollars in income. But then came graduation.

Gates was accepted to Harvard and began attending in 1974, intending to study either Mathematics or Law. But college wasn't where Gates wanted to be, and he dropped out late in his freshman year. His riches earned later have often caused his biographies to say he "attended Harvard", which is being very charitable. Of course, he has received a number of honorary doctorates since then.

What caused Gates to drop out was the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, which touted the new Altair microcomputer, a shot across the bow of the geekdom world that said that computers were about to become more affordable, more accessible, and amazingly powerful in a short time. His undeniable nose for profit already attuned, Gates and old friend Paul Allen decided they needed to enter this market, and together they set up the Micro Soft company in Albequerque, New Mexico. Albequerque, it should be noted, had been looking like it was going to be the center of all things computer and computer-based, and that explains the non-sequitur choice by Gates and Allen to relocate themselves there.

It was during his time down in New Mexico that Gates was stopped for a traffic infraction. Unfortunately, the complete details of his arrest and mugshot have been lost to time, either intentionally (if you're a conspirator) or simply because who would have thought anyone would give a shit about some geek getting pulled over 20 years ago. Either way, all we have to go by is this snapshot of Gates being hauled in front of the camera, grinning his ass off, perhaps thinking himself above it all or incredulous that things had gotten that far. Gates has changed his story several times on what happened that night, but the most plausible is that he ran a stop light and wasn't carrying his license with him when he was pulled over, requiring a visit down to the station.

The photo also unintentionally captures classic Gates: completely wrecked hair, terrible looking clothes, generally slovenly appearance, and two glazed eyes staring out past thick glasses. This image changed very little over the bulk of Gates' career, with the shower taps running at much less frequency than the money taps. It should also be noted that this isn't some heaping of sour grapes from the gutter staring up at Bill's mountain of success; throughout the time he has been known in public, Bill's dedication to all-nighters and in-the-trenches energy ensured a number of high-profile press conferences and demonstrations where his lack of hygiene became as breathtaking as the product being demonstrated.

Micro Soft (later renamed MicroSoft)'s money was to be made selling software, and while this might seem logical, at the time it was not the norm. Computers, especially for the hobbyist market, were so expensive and so time-consuming to build out of kits, that a natural social set of users and owners would trade any software they constructed freely, looking at the software as icing on a cake and hardly anyone's bread and butter. Bill's company had written a port of the BASIC programming language (previously seen on other machines, and which Bill neither designed nor paid royalties for the use of) and this software, retailing at over $600 in 1975, was freely traded among the different computer owners, since, well, six hundred dollars is a lot of fucking money. This drove the young Gates ballistic, and in that year he fired off what became known as "The Letter", or "An Open Letter to Hobbyists", in which he decried this outward theft of his (ported, design-lifted) product.

The letter drips with ironies, as Gates asks a group of people to stop taking his software and using it for free, when in fact his entire distribution model had depended on these very groups, and his product wasn't his exclusively in the first place. Needless to say, these sort of demands became much easier once Gates' company essentially corralled the entire market under its wing.

Gates and Allen moved Micro Soft back home to Seattle, Washington in 1979, where it has remained to this day. Also remaining to this day have been the interesting traits of Gates' personality: intensity, single-mindedness, and a screeching myopia about competitors and the market in general. Most of these traits have transferred to the company's practices, which are worthy of an entry in themselves.

MicroSoft's fortunes became many and varied, and Gates quickly helped bring the company to various levels of industry dominance. Previously Apple Computer had gone public and made its founders instant millionaires. When Microsoft went public in 1986, Bill Gates also found himself an unbelievably rich man; the richest man in the United States. He was thirty-five years old. As time has told, Gates's fortune has increased enormously since then, making him the richest man, period. Silly calculations about his fortunes have come out, including noting that at one point William H. Gates III was personally earning $250 a second.

Money is not everything, so they say, and life with your nose placed firmly into a screen could be quite empty. As he was shuffled from meeting to convention, from press conference to all-night planning session, Gates no doubt yearned for companionship. Of course, his approaches might have left something to be desired. He was infamous for his "virtual dates", where he would have a woman he was interested in see a movie in whatever city she was living in at the same time he was, and then they would discuss the movie over the phone later.

And it was inevitable that the female employees of a company owned by a bachelor who also happened to be the most loaded man in the universe would begin to swarm like bees at a honey festival. Semi-joke buttons were worn by employees offering themselves, and nobody would turn down any such interest by Big Bill. So it should come as no major surprise when Mr. Gates settled his eye on one Melinda French, a marketing manager within the company, in the early 1990's. It is beyond our research to conclude the nature of the relationship, but it has survived more than many such high-profile couplings; and on January 1, 1994, Gates rented a Hawaiian island and married Melinda.

It is worth noting that it's actually kind of illegal to rent a Hawaiian island, but we'll give Bill the benefit of the doubt and assume it wasn't his word that shut down public roads and access during the length of the wedding on Lanai, for security reasons. Money Trumps Law is a pretty easy equation to work out in any checkbook.

Gates has been naturally quiet about his home life since that time, but it is known that he has twice bucked the odds of most programmers and produced children by Melinda, names of Jennifer and Rory. He also lives in a home whose size, automation, and cost have achieved legendary status within the state of Washington, but that's almost a pre-requisite of multi-billionaires.

In a worthwhile side note, Gates was targeted and hit with a Pie while attending a meeting in Brussels hosted by Flemish Minister and President Van den Brande in 1998. While he later waved off the effect of the pie on him, the look on his face, stumbling away looking for somewhere to clean up in private, says it all: the teary-eyed, stricken gaze of the picked-upon nerd. It is likely the last time anything like that will happen again, if he can pay enough.